Optical interconnects may function instead of or in compliment to other interconnects, such as electrical interconnects. Various architectures with optical interconnects are known in the art, including those for intra-chip communication employing optical waveguides and microring resonators. External lasers are used to inject light into a waveguide (often many wavelengths multiplexed) and the microring resonator functions as an electrically controllable switch that draws light out of the waveguide. Various such architectures utilize some form of external contention resolution, such as arbitration or an optical queue, which may be a complicated and/or resource-intensive structure to implement, for example, automatic buffering of optical packets arriving on different waveguides but in the same wavelength.